I spend a lot of time writing about the trials and tribulations of building our house, but I haven’t really talked too much about some of the more intangible benefits that come from living out in the country.  Even though, we are only about a 45 minute drive from Ottawa, we are in quite a rural location.  Considering that from our old house in Toronto, if we drove for 45 minutes on the 401, we wouldn’t even really be out of the city and surrounding townships in that time.  So we are quite pleased to be able to enjoy the rural lifestyle, and still not be too far away from a major city.

There are some great things about living the rural lifestyle.  The silence, for one.  It is so nice to be outside and all you hear are birds singing, and the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves.  There are a lot of wetlands around here, and on quiet nights in the spring, the sound of the frogs singing is almost overwhelming.

That’s the other good thing about being out of a major city centre – at night there is a lot less light pollution, and the stars you can see are quite an incredible sight!

We also get a number of visitors which pass through from time to time.  We used to have quite a lot of wild turkeys which would pass through, but I haven’t seen too many since the last hunting season.  There are also some deer that visit our apple trees in the night, but we have so far not been lucky enough to see them in person.  We also often see foxes, there used to be a pair that would play in a meadow just down the road from us, it was nice to see them having fun!

Today though, on our way back from town, we found this little fella relaxing in our driveway.  One thing I know for sure – it’s important to be able to distinguish a garden turtle from a snapping turtle – and this guy was s snapping turtle (you can tell by the way his shell has pointy bits on it around his tail / rear area.)

A good sized snapping turtle like this guy has got to be respected, if you get your fingers anywhere near him you’re liable to lose one!  I just held our local newspaper folded up in the picture for reference, I wasn’t poking at him or anything  🙂

Anyway, those are just a few of the reasons we love living out here.  The city life does have it’s benefits, but it’s really hard to beat the simple beauty of nature.  Hopefully this sheds a little light on why we embarked on this somewhat crazy journey to begin with!

The past month has seen us complete a number of things, though it has been, as usual, slow going over here.  While we have been working on the house, one of our rabbits has taken ill and requires a fair amount of attention, so it is good that I am around during the day to keep an eye on him.  We are hopeful that with a lot of TLC (and antibiotics), that he’ll be able to recover and stay with us for years to come!

Here’s a picture of his girlfriend, lounging beside the box that we need to keep him contained in – for his own safety.

On the house front, with some help from my mother (who has been coming around to help out from time to time), I managed to get the drywall installed on the ceiling above the stairwell, which was fairly tricky business.  Not only did I have to accurately cut a hole in the drywall to allow access to our attic hatch/stairs, but we also had to build a platform over the stairs that we could put ladders on, to hoist up and fasten the drywall into place.  Thankfully, this all went fairly smoothly, as you can see in the following picture.

It will still be a bit of a chore to finish the rest of the drywall on the walls in there, but not as bad.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I messed up when I cut one of the tiles for our master bathroom floor, and was waiting for when I tiled the floor in the main bathroom to fix it.  I got around to this about a week ago, and fixing the tile wasn’t as bad as I thought.  I first pulled up the improperly cut tile, leaving me with a bit of a mess to clean up.

I carefully went over the area with a small prying tool and popped out as much of the thinset as I could, to leave me with the best possible starting area.  It was difficult to get all the thinset out, without damaging the Ditra, but it’s not super important that the Ditra got a little banged up in the process.  After I was done prying everything out, I carefully vacuumed the area out to remove any last remnants.

And here’s a couple pictures of the tile laid and then grouted, you can’t even really tell that I made the mistake to begin with!  Thankfully I still had some grout left over from tiling before, so it was no problem to match it perfectly.

As I said, I was planning to replace that tile when I did the tiling in the other main bathroom / laundry room – the process was much the same as with the master bathroom.  I added screws to the subfloor to better secure it to the floor joists underneath, then laid a layer of Ditra XL.  We didn’t really need the Ditra here for waterproofing reasons, but it is a great uncoupling layer for putting down tile and has the added benefit of coming out level with the 3/4″ hardwood floors at the transitions.  In the following picture you can see that I also spent a day or so installing our vanity in that bathroom – such a convenience to have warm and cold running water to an actual sink!

When I tiled the master bathroom, I rented a wet tile saw to cut all the tiles.  Because it was a lot of bother to rent the tilesaw (quite unweildy so I had to beg another vehicle from family), this tile I decided to just use my 4″ grinder with a ceramic/diamond blade.  It went surprisingly well, except for the one tile I had to cut twice because I rushed it the first time.  Trick is a steady hand and to let the grinder do the work.  Honestly I just watched a guy do it on youtube and then did it myself, it’s not really hard!

Because I wanted to lay the floors all in one go, I pre-cut all the tiles in advance and dry fitted them with their spacers to make sure everything would fit correctly.

The only difficulty with this approach was that I realized, I would have to pretty well be able to lay the tiles identically a second time.  When I came to that realization, I decided to do the tiles over two days – the first day I laid a row of tiles from the door to the far end of the room, and stopped there.  The second day I was able to walk on those tiles, so I could lay the tiles on the other side and under the vanity.  It all worked out pretty well, I think, and it seems our new cat Daisy agrees.  Another wipe-down with a damp rag to get rid of the grout haze, and it’ll look super!

Since the floor was complete I decided to get the washer and dryer tucked away in there, to at least get them out of the way, and make it easier to do laundry  (we had jury-rigged something before, but it was not really ideal.)

At some point I will actually need to hook up the dryer, but for now we can dry our clothes on the line which is better for them anyway (and they always smell so fresh after being out on the line!)  Next up, I’ll be working on the ducting for the HRV, and will endeavour to get a few photos of that as it progresses, as boring as it may be  🙂

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed the photos!

Just a quick update – we called in to the Health Unit’s automated water testing line and found out that our water sample passed!  Zero coliforms and zero fecal bacteria found, so that is another item off the list in our journey to our certificate of occupancy – officially potable water!

Another small victory in a seemingly endless struggle!

We are slowly but steadily working our way to our certificate of occupancy.  The building inspector provided us a helpful list of things that have to get done, before we can get it, which consists of:

• water potability certificate from the Health Unit: the contractor who drilled our well is coming by today to chlorinate the well and then we can get the water test done.
• septic completion certificate from the Health Unit: this was completed last summer when the septic system was installed.
• ESA certificate: We have almost completed everything necessary to get our final electrical inspection done, then we can check this item off the list.
• HVAC and plumbing completion: Plumbing has been completed, but we still have to connect our radiant heating system, the fireplaces, and the HRV.
• coverage of combustible insulation: we have not started this yet but hopefully can wrap it up in not too long.
• drywall installed but not necessarily taped: complete!
• guard and handrails installed (temporary rails are OK): complete!

So things are moving along reasonably well.  As mentioned in the last post regarding the hardwood flooring, to change the direction in the bedroom, we had to use a “spline”.  Basically I cut a strip of 1/4″ plywood, about 7/16ths of an inch wide, and glue it into the groove of a few pieces of the flooring:

After about 30 minutes when the glue sets up you can change the direction you are laying down the hardwood floor by putting that spline into the groove of a flooring board:

I am trying to stay focused only on the work that needs to be done in order to get our certificate of occupancy, so I figured I should connect the gas range and fireplaces and get them squared away, so that if there is any inspection required for them, we can get that done before drywalling them in.

The living room fireplace and the gas range both required that I convert them to run on propane (instead of natural gas as shipped from the factory).  I diligently carried out the conversions, taking care to follow all instructions provided and then tested all connections with soapy water to ensure no gas leaks.

In the interest of wrapping up our electrical, now that the weather is nice I finally got outside and properly buried our electrical ground wires, and also closed in the 30Amp generator inlet port we’ve been using to charge the battery bank.

Here’s a couple pictures of the completed electrical service panel and also our plumbing manifold, with everything connected except for the two remaining lines for the bathtub in the master bathroom.

I also did a little more work on the kitchen cabinets to get a temporary working area going so that we could free up some space to work in the main bath/laundry room.  Because we running the cabinets out as a peninsula type affair, I added some wood supports to that I’d have a way to securely fasten the cabinets back-to-back:

Once that was done I could get the cabinets installed on the back side of that and get them all leveled and set up with a piece of 3/4″ plywood for a temporary working surface.

In the second picture above you can see that we still have a few more sheets of drywall, those are to finish out the main bath/laundry room and around the fireplaces.

We unfortunately still have random problems with our internet so that’s why this post was a bit late, but there isn’t much we can do about it until after we get our siding on – once that is in place we can get the tower installed to get real internet  🙂

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed the photos!

We continue to have issues with our internet, uploading pictures has now become somewhat difficult but still possible under good circumstances (I’ve not been able to deduce exactly what those circumstances are!)

Since the last post I managed to get most of the master bedroom area  tidied up – we moved the bathtub into the master bath, and in doing so discovered that I actually cut one of the floor tiles wrong, so it looks as though I’ll have a bit of an adventure pulling up that tile and then re-cutting and laying a new one.  I will probably put this off until we do more tiling and rent the tile saw again.

We also managed to get the toilet installed in the master bath, and connect it to the plumbing, so at least now we have a properly functioning toilet that we don’t have to flush with a bucket of water (that was getting old!)

With the cleanout of the bedroom largely complete, I finally got around to installing the last of the vapour barrier and drywall in there, all that’s left is some drywall around the fireplace (has to wait until we fully connect the fireplace).

Once I got that squared away I have been continuing on with the hardwood floor – to keep the hardwood floor going straight in the bedroom, I screwed a sheet of plywood to the floor to provide a solid backing and ensure none of the flooring boards shifted as I nailed them down with the nailer.  In the picture below, you can see I am installing from left to right (looking in the bedroom door) – after I get the “right” side completed, I’ll take up the plywood and use a “spline” to reverse the direction of the tongue & groove flooring (more on this later) and finish off the “left” side of the room, and that will be the end of the flooring except for some trim pieces here and there.

Hope you enjoyed the pictures and we’ll be trying to post more frequently now that things are coming along a bit more quickly.

Well, it seems as though spring is finally here, and we are so happy to see it after such a bitterly cold winter.  I must apologize for the delay, this post was supposed to go up a while ago but I have been having troubles uploading pictures lately  🙁

Since the last post I have been tackling projects on several fronts – I kept going with the hardwood flooring until I got to the row that would continue through into the bedroom area.

I decided to stop there, as I still have to complete installing the vapour barrier in the bedroom, and there are a bunch of construction materials piled up in there, that I needed to get cleared away.  In an effort to reduce clutter, I figured I could finish more of the master bathroom, and that would clear away some of the materials and give me the space necessary to .  To start getting the kitchen in shape, now that the hardwood floor is down, I started getting some of the cabinets in place, so we can really start getting a better sense of the space.

While we had originally planned to tile our shower walls, in an effort to move things forward more quickly, we picked up an acrylic shower wall kit and installed that, and then laid down the porcelain tile on the bathroom floor, and got it grouted.  We laid down Ditra XL over the subfloor (the tile goes on top of it) as it provides a pretty waterproof uncoupling layer and should ensure the tiles don’t crack over time.  We chose Ditra XL, instead of regular Ditra, as it will match up well with our 3/4″ hardwood floor so we have a smooth transition from the hardwood to the tile.

Now that we’ve got that squared away, we can finish installing the bathtub, the toilet, and our vanity, and once those are complete the bedroom should be clear out enough to finish off the vapour barrier in there.  Finally, we’ll take care of the drywall and flooring in there, and be much closer to a finished home.

Sorry for the delay in posting, but hopefully all the pictures make up for it!

We have slowly been plugging away over here, and enjoying the milder weather compared to the bitterly cold February we just had.  After the last post I pressure tested the hot and cold water lines to the shower, and found a small leak in the cold water supply, so I fixed that up and also installed the “drop ear” fitting for the shower head.  I had to screw in a piece of 3/4″ plywood to mount the fitting onto, to get it set at the right depth for the finished wall.

As regards to flooring, we had a really hard time deciding what type of flooring to use.  The “best” kind of flooring to use over a radiant heat floor, is tile, but we found tile to be quite expensive and also it is a little hard on the feet.  We also looked at cork, bamboo, laminate, and other engineered floors, but we used some of this in our previous house (kitchen remodel) and were not happy with it’s durability.  We finally ended up deciding to go with solid hardwood, but pricing for pre-finished hardwood is still quite expensive ($4/sq.ft.), and we didn’t want to pay a premium for a floor we will probably wreck and need to refinish anyway.  After doing some inquiring and research, we ended up special ordering some “cabin grade” red oak flooring at our local Home Hardware, which is an unfinished solid oak flooring, for only $2.80/sq.ft.

The flooring comes from a sustainable tree farm up in Quebec and is basically their “factory seconds” so there are a lot of short boards and boards with some small defects, but it’s still a solid floor and no doubt will still look great when we finish it out.

Our current plan is to finish the flooring in the living room/kitchen area, so we can finish the drywall in there and get the kitchen cabinets set up, then we can focus on completing the master bedroom to get that squared away.  After that we will have to add a few more electrical outlets in the basement, and drywall down there (all the pink xps foam insulation needs to be covered), and we will be well on our way to getting our certificate of occupancy!

Thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed the pictures!

I got out today and picked up the plumbing fittings I had ordered, which let me get the hot water heater connected up.  If you look close at the following picture, you can see the cold water line continues on and stops at a ball valve.  This is going to be the cold water supply line into the second hot water heater, that will run our radiant heating system.  You can also see that I wedge in some rockwool insulation between the exhaust pipe and the cold/hot water lines (better safe than sorry!)

Also included with that batch of fittings, was the stuff I needed to rough-in the shower for the master bath, here are the steps I took to get it done:

Step 1: Fasten your shower valve to some 2×4″ blocking in the wall, at a comfortable height.  The instructions that come with the valve will tell you how far to set it back, to ensure that everything will be flush with the finished wall.  We used a Delta multi-choice/shower only valve.

Step 2: Apply pipe dope to the male threads on the valve.  On this valve, because it’s a shower only, there are only three connections (hot & cold supply lines, and the showerhead).  If you had a bathtub faucet there would be a fourth connection on the bottom.

Step 3: Tighten the 1/2″ PEX to threaded fittings onto the connections that you just applied the pipe dope onto.

Step 4: Stub out a couple sections of PEX with 90 degree fittings.  Convention with water is always, cold on the right, hot on the left.

Step 5: Connect cold and hot water supply lines to the 90 degree fittings, and another line up for the shower head.

From here I have to pressure test the system to make sure there are no leaks,  and finally attach one last fitting that the showerhead will screw into, and we’ll be ready to close in the walls completely!

Hope you enjoyed the pictures, tomorrow will try to fire up the hot water heater and see what happens!

First off, let me apologize for the delay in making this post – it has, as usual, been a very busy time since we last posted, and we of course had some delays relating to the problems with the spray foam insulation that was used in our house.

We ended up getting an independent engineers report on how to best resolve the issue with the insulation, they recommended applying a vapour barrier per Ontario Building Code standards, so we had to get that completed before we could start drywalling the exterior walls.  At this point, we have the vapour barrier applied, and correctly sealed with acoustical sealant, on all exterior walls except our master bedroom, and have been approved by our building inspector to continue installing that and then go ahead with the drywall.

One of the issues we had to solve in applying the vapour barrier, was how to correctly seal around all the electrical boxes in those walls.  The building inspector recommended removing the boxes, wrapping them in plastic (same material used for the vapour barrier, 6mil poly sheeting), and sealing that to the vapour barrier.  We tried this approach on a couple of boxes and it was pretty labour intensive to get it done right.  We ended up also speaking to the electrical inspector about this, and he recommended just digging out the spray foam from around the boxes, and spraying in “Great Stuff” canned spray foam, as that is a vapour barrier…we were happy that our building inspector accepted this alternate plan as it was a lot easier to do and did not require disturbing all the electrical boxes.

In the midst of all this, I started working on roughing in the shower in our master bath, but need a few more plumbing fittings before I can finish that off.  Also, I realized I needed to add another 2×4″ in one of the walls, to support the glass shower wall/door, so I will have to get that done before I can finish out those walls.  You’ll notice in the pictures, that the drywall in the bathroom is green – this is a special mold-resistant drywall intended for use in bathrooms.  It’s about as easy to work with as regular drywall, just more expensive.  You’ll also notice  that on the lower part of the wall in the master bathroom, we have used cement board instead of the mold resistant drywall.  Cement board is just as it sounds – a 4×8′, 1/2″ sheet of reinforced cement.  It’s really heavy compared to drywall and quite difficult to work with compared to drywall, but it’s what you are supposed to use if you plan on tiling the walls (we plan to tile behind the tub and the shower walls), as drywall cannot really support the extra weight of tiles.

Finally, I plumbed up the main water line to the central water distribution manifold, and started connected the cold water to the hot water tank – but of course realized I needed a few more plumbing fittings to complete this job, so it’s on hold until I pick those up this week.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy the pictures, and we’ll make an effort to post more often!  We are going to be ordering some unfinished hardwood flooring to put down, before we start installing the kitchen cabinets, hopefully we can get that underway soon.

Since the last update, things have been reasonably slow going over here, but there is a good reason for it (albeit a shitty one).

It turns out, that the spray foam that the contractor used in our house, does not meet Ontario Building Code standards, and as such our building inspector has given the contractor an “Order to Comply”, to correct the issues (by Jan 31st).  We are not holding our breath – it seems for the first time that we have encountered an unscrupulous contractor, and if they do not comply with the order, they will apparently get fined/taken to court by the building inspector, so we will see where this all goes.  It’s quite frustrating and disappointing to have had such good contractors so far in the process only to be ripped off at this point.

In the meantime, I managed to complete the installation of the vapour barrier on the ceiling, and sealed it all up good with acoustical sealant (which is nasty stuff to work with, if you ever have to use it I suggest having some rubber gloves as if it gets on you, it’s hard to get off).  On that front, we were inspected again and approved by the building inspector to at least start the drywalling of the ceiling, and the interior walls.  I picked up 30 sheets of drywall and got right to work.  Here’s a few pictures:

Thanks for reading, we’ll be sure to give an update soon with how things are going!